Orkut joins graveyard of dead Google products

The Google-owned social networking site Orkut -- which was at
one point massively popular in Brazil -- is to close down later
this year.

Orkut was created by Google employee Orkut Orkut Büyükkökten as
a "20 percent" project in 2004 and became extremely popular in
certain markets including Brazil and India. In fact, so popular was
it in Brazil -- where it had around 30 million monthly unique users
-- that it took until
2012 for Facebook to eclipse it as the most popular social
networking site in the country.

In a blog
post, engineering director Paulo Golgher explained that Orkut
would close on 30 September, 2014. "Over the past decade, YouTube,
Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up
in every corner of the world. Because the growth has outpaced
Orkut's growth, we've decided to build Orkut farewell (or, tchau).
We'll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other
social platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses
them," he added.

Existing Orkut users will be able to export their profile data,
community posts and photos using Google Takeout -- up until as late
as September 2016. No new profiles can be created as from today (30
June).

Google will create an archive of all of the public communities
and will make them available online from 30 September.

"It's been a great 10 years, and we apologise to those still
actively using the services. We hope people will find other online
communities that spark more conversations and build even more
connections for the next decade and beyond."

Orkut will join a graveyard of other killed-off Google products
including Google Reader (2004-2013), iGoogle (2005-2013) and Google
Wave (2009-2012).